Lençóis

Lençóis was named for sheets — lençóis — because the flat rock formations at the edge of town, where early diamond prospectors camped under canvas stretched between boulders, looked from a distance like laundry drying on the rocks. This is the kind of founding mythology I find enormously satisfying: practical, unglamorous, and specific. The town that grew up around the garimpeiro camps is now a low-slung grid of eighteenth and nineteenth-century colonial houses, some painted in faded pastels, some in more confident blues and yellows, on streets of uneven stone too narrow for comfortable car traffic. I arrived in the afternoon on a bus that had taken six hours from Salvador and immediately felt the altitude — about 900 meters above sea level — as a coolness that was extraordinary after the coastal heat.

The Roncador River runs right through the edge of town, and the stretch where it flows over smooth quartzite slabs — the serras, as they are locally called — is where the townspeople swim in the evenings. I joined them on my second afternoon, picking my way over the pink rock in bare feet to a deep pool below a small cascade where a dozen children were jumping from an overhanging boulder. The water was cold in the way of mountain streams everywhere, which is to say: clarifying. I swam for an hour and then lay on a warm flat rock while the town’s sounds drifted down — guitar from a bar, motorbikes on cobblestones, someone’s rooster enormously confident about the time of day despite the fact that it was five in the afternoon.

The streets have a concentration of small restaurants serving a Bahian-cerrado hybrid cuisine: açaí in its more authentic unsweetened form, grilled game meats, freshwater fish, regional vegetables cooked with dendê oil. A place on the main praça, run by a woman who seemed to be operating it simultaneously with several other projects in her life, served a bean stew with smoked sausage and cassava that I ate two days running at different tables.

Lençóis also has the infrastructure for serious trekking: guides, gear rental, and the organizational base for multi-day walks through the national park. The Lapão cave and Fumaça waterfall are both day trips from here; the Circuito das Cachoeiras is a multi-day route through the chapada requiring three to five days and a reliable guide. I did three day walks from town and considered four times abandoning my onward plans entirely.

When to go: May through September is ideal — dry season, temperatures comfortable for walking (18–28°C), the waterfalls full from the previous rains. October and November bring the beginning of the rainy season — trails can become muddy but the flowers on the cerrado are spectacular. Avoid January and February for serious hiking; some trails are inaccessible.